A Pirates of the Burning Sea Primer

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Flying Lab's CEO clues us in on the present and future of this swashbuckling MMO.

By Cam Shea

There's no doubt that Pirates of the Burning Sea is one of the most alluring MMOs we've seen in some time, taking players back to the Caribbean in the 1720s, to a world of pirates and imperialism. The PC guys recently reviewed the game, and one of their criticisms was that it's sometimes harder than it should be for players to work out and utilise all the systems available in the game. With that in mind we were lucky enough to sit down with Flying Lab's CEO Russell Williams for an extensive demo where he outlined many of the mechanics in detail. What better companion to the review, then, than information and tips from the man himself? He even spilled some juicy info on where the game will be going from here.

Before we move on to that, however, we should mention that Australian gamers are going to get a great deal when Pirates of the Burning Sea launches down under on February 27. Flying Lab, you see, has teamed up with BigPond to offer the game for free. Interested gamers can pre-register for a download or to secure one of 100,000 DVDs of the game. Direct your browsers to GameArena to do so. Free + great game = good value in our books. You'll get a free seven day trial, and after that subscriptions start from AU $15.95 per month. So now you know where to get it, how about we let Russell Williams tell you more…

Flying Lab on nations and classes:

When you start Pirates you've got four different nations that you can play – Spanish, Pirate, British, French. And if you're playing Spanish, British or French, you've got these various sub-classes that you can play. So you can play Free-traders, and Free-traders are the economic anchors in the game – they make everything in the gameworld, all the way from bandages to cannon balls, to the actual ships themselves. And that has a huge profound implication for how our PVP works.

The Naval Officers focus on disciplined fighting and they get the biggest ships in the game. They're the only people who legally can buy frigates or the ship of the lines. You'll notice that their costumes when you start off are relatively bland. You can customise them but at level five we give you a Captain's Certification, and then you get your cool coat and your hat. And in fact, just like any other game, we want to keep giving you visual costume rewards as you keep levelling up, so that people can actually recognise a Captain versus an Admiral as they go through it.

Best water effects in an MMO? Probably. Biggest (cannon) balls too.

Finally, if you want, you can play a Privateer. Privateers represent – essentially – legalised piracy. They can take ships from other players, but if they take a ship from another player, they have to split the proceeds from it with the crown, and they cannot use that ship for themselves, otherwise that would be piracy. Which takes us to pirates.

Pirates have one career path… [and] are sort of on an orthogonal path to everyone else, and they've got special abilities that nobody else has. A pirate can actually take a ship from any other player in the game and use it as their ship. So you can take all the way up to a 104 gun ship of the line, board it, take it from the other guy, sail around with a 104 gun ship of the line. But obviously pirates can't stroll into a shipyard and say 'I'd like you to build me a 104 gun ship of the line. Why? For terror of course!'.

Flying Lab on role-playing story arcs:

We always wanted it to be recognisably the Caribbean of the 1720s, but beyond that there's so much richness of story and genre that we can bring into the world, and we do that with something called the role-playing story arcs. We have over a thousand missions per nation, but we have other missions that are highly customised scripted encounters. For example, you go into a bar and normally there's other players there and NPCs, and you go talk to the other players and get missions from the NPCs. One day you walk into the bar and there's a big party going on, and there are no other PCs in there. What looks like a normal persistent instance is an individualised instance for yourself. You walk in and you've got two of your NPC friends there; this cast of characters that you accumulate as you play the game, and they say 'we're trying to decide who the prettiest girl in the place is – we need you to settle the bet for us'. So you walk around and flirt with the different NPCs and come back and make your decision. And that person becomes your love interest for the rest of the 50 mission arc… so we have these moments where it's a very individualised storyline, and the choices you make reverberate throughout that entire cycle.

Sweet pirate booty.

Flying Lab on shifting up the gameplay:

Because we have a bit of an instance-based approach… it lets us have the main core of the game as the Caribbean in 1720, and anybody would recognise it coming into the game, but you can go off and we can give you very different kinds of content and gameplay… [there's] a mission where you're sneaking into an island to recover the skull of this ghost who's been giving you trouble and there's zombies percolating throughout the island and you have to sneak in amongst the zombies undetected. So it lets us give you very different kinds of gameplay if you want to spread out there.

Flying Lab on why the highly accurate sailing model didn't work:

We actually built the accurate model and that turned out to suck. People hated that! We actually built a model where if you sail into the wind you slow down, stop, then start moving backwards. Guess how that went over? …the funny thing is, now, playing the game – it is all you can do to keep up with just sailing your vessel, thinking about where the wind position is, where the enemy is, how does their vessel react to the wind, and all of that, and hitting the space bar to fire your cannons. We've got all sorts of options that people still don't use. And we had about 400 times as much depth before when we tested it, and people were just like 'errr'.